Survey Design

You start with the best of intentions. You just got this great new software to help you collect the data you need. And while it may or may not be SurveyGizmo, it’s very exciting to have so much power and flexibility at your fingertips. When you get down to it, the possibilities are truly endless…

A lot has changed in mobile technology–and mobile surveys–since we originally published this whitepaper in Survey Magazine in 2011. Which is why we’re revisiting it with updated statistics, new insights, and best practices for designing mobile-optimized surveys and reaching your increasingly mobile audience.

Even if you are not yet familiar with the term “Likert Scale,” you have definitely come across scale question types. They are among the most comment types of questions asked, particularly in online surveys. While easy for respondents, it’s the variety in the units that can make Likert Scales difficult or intimidating for survey creators to…

If you’re wondering how many questions you need to include in your survey, the short answer is: as few as possible. Keeping your question count low is crucial, because survey fatigue is a real danger for survey makers hoping to collect the best, most accurate data. A few well worded, well designed questions are usually…

When designing a survey, one of the first things you need to do is decide the survey’s purpose. Asking yourself, “What is this survey for?” is important, but determining purpose goes beyond this simple question. While the above question will help you outline what questions to ask and which topics to cover, this is just…

An increasing large proportion of Americans are climbing into the “over 65 years of age” bracket, which means that this demographic is becoming ever more interesting to researchers of all kinds. For nearly every discipline, this means they need to survey older adults regularly. Ph.D. candidate Kelly Quinn of the University of Illinois at Chicago…

Design isn’t just for band posters, webpages, and great surveys. It’s for data, too. You might try to stop me here. A common perception is that design is something artsy, not something analytical. Data is about hard numbers. Surely presenting the numbers, the raw data, is the best way to share your findings with the…

Survey design has a lot of moving parts. You have to word your questions carefully in order to avoid introducing bias, your response options need to cover all possible answers, and you need to make good use of logic to keep your response rates nice and high (and that’s just a few of many considerations)….

Client relations can sometimes feel like a game of telephone. Salespeople, account managers, product team members, executives, technical representatives, and customer service representatives are all speaking to a client at various points in their customer journey. Everybody on the team has a slightly different understanding of how a product or service works, and as a…